I watched the first episode of Friends over lunch today. By my reckoning, it's over 10 years since I last watched Friends all the way through, and I've had a bit of a hankering for it recently. It's nothing to do with the inexplicable rise of Friends merchandise (up to and including Krispy Kreme doughnuts) in the last year or so but rather simply the fact that Friends always was, more than pretty much anything else on television, my "comfort show".
I was always aware that Friends was going to age. Hell, when I first started watching it, the first season in particular already looked very dated in terms of the fashion sense and hairstyles. But there are ways in which it shows its age now that I wouldn't have considered back when I was obsessively watching it as a teen.
The laugh track, for example. Audience or canned laughter has completely fallen out of favour for TV shows over the course of the last 20-25 years or so, to such a degree that there are those who find it (if you'll pardon my use of GenZ vernacular for a moment) "cringe". Even people who were there for it first time around.
Honestly, I've never had a problem with a laugh track. In fact, with Friends, it was part of the experience — as emphasised by the YouTube videos that remove it and make Ross in particular look like a psychopath as a result. But it was more than just a signal of when something funny had happened; I really enjoyed hearing the audience reactions that were other than just laughter.
For example, during that all-important moment in the second season where Rachel learns exactly how much Ross was in love with her in his late teens and ends up kissing him, there's an absolutely glorious moment as she walks across the room to him in complete silence, the only sound being her shoes echoing on the hardwood floor of Monica's apartment. Then, as she comes up to Ross and grabs his face in preparation to kiss him, there's an audible gasp from an audience member that feels completely genuine. Then, when the kiss happens a moment later, there is cheering, screaming and applauding. It's an amazing moment, made all the more amazing by how the audience had clearly been rooting for them, but were unsure if the writers were ever going to resolve that particular dangling thread.
Friends, like many shows of its time, was filmed in front of a live studio audience, and this allowed the cast to work around the laughter and other reactions. Supposedly Lisa Kudrow, who played Phoebe, absolutely hated it when the audience interrupted her lines with laughter, but she never let it show. At the other end of the spectrum, it's abundantly clear that the late, great Matthew Perry adored playing to the crowd, with much of his delivery reliant on pausing for reaction and playing off the audience's response. It's different from what TV shows today do, yes, but it's not an inferior way of doing things by any stretch of the imagination.
Sometimes this backfires for a non-native audience, such as when a guest star shows up to rapturous applause from the American audience, but no-one in the UK has any clue whatsoever who the person in question is. (Okay, I very rarely knew who the person was, outside of a few obvious exceptions like when George Clooney and Noah Wyle, riding the peak of ER's fame at the time, showed up.) But you can get something from that even if your response isn't the same as the audience's; it's a sign that Friends was huge, and Hollywood people were almost certainly queueing around the block to make a guest appearance in what was, for a long time, the hottest sitcom in town.
With the bizarre resurgence in Friends merchandise there has been recently, I wonder how much it really resonates with a modern audience — i.e. those who grew up after the launch of smartphones, and after the ubiquity of the Internet had been well and truly established. Very few people in Friends even have a mobile phone, and computer use is rare to see, often the subject of comedy. The way people develop interpersonal relationships has changed massively since Friends' time. Hell, even the concept of just hanging out with your friends in person at their place is likely to be completely alien to some people — I was there for it, and it even feels like a distant memory to me, to be perfectly honest.
But the strength of Friends wasn't necessarily that it was a snapshot of a time and place — although, many years after it was current, it functions quite nicely as just that — but rather that it was a show with some strong, well-defined and nuanced characters, with a wide array of interesting storylines, many of which were rather boundary-pushing at the time of the show's original broadcast. So far as I'm concerned, it still holds up very well as a "comfort show" for me due to its familiarity — and I suspect, so long as a younger viewer can get around the culture shock of certain ubiquitous aspects of 21st century life just being flat-out absent from much of the show's run, there's still a lot they can get from it, too.
There is, I'm sure, plenty you can criticise Friends for if you want to get on the tedious "everything is problematic" bus, but fuck that. I love Friends, I always have done, and starting this new rewatch afresh this lunchtime, I suspect I always will.
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